Presentation and rendering of images and graphics on data processing systems and user terminals, such as computers, and in particular on mobile terminals have increased tremendously the last years. For example, three-dimensional (3D) graphics and images have a number of appealing applications on such terminals, including games, 3D maps and messaging, screen savers and man-machine interfaces.
A 3D graphics rendering process typically comprises three sub-stages. Briefly, a first stage, the application stage, creates several triangles. The corners of these triangles are transformed, projected and lit in a second stage, the geometry stage. In a third stage, the rasterization stage, images, often denoted textures, can be “glued” onto the triangles, increasing the realism of the rendered image. The third stage typically also performs sorting using a z-buffer.
However, rendering of images and textures, and in particular 3D images and graphics, is a computationally expensive task in terms of memory bandwidth and processing power required for the graphic systems. For example, textures are costly both in terms of memory, the textures must be placed on or cached in fast on-chip memory, and in terms of memory bandwidth, a texture can be accessed several times to draw a single pixel.
In order to reduce the bandwidth and processing power requirements, an image (texture) encoding method or system is typically employed. Such an encoding system should result in more efficient usage of expensive on-chip memory and lower memory bandwidth during rendering and, thus, in lower power consumption and/or faster rendering. This reduction in bandwidth and processing power requirements is particularly important for thin clients, such as mobile units and telephones, with a small amount of memory, little memory bandwidth and limited power (powered by batteries).
In addition to efficiently and accurately compressing and decompressing an image, there is a general desire that the texture compression and decompression systems should have the capability of managing alpha components. Such alpha components can be used to represent transparent or semi-transparent pixels or texels in the textures, which are used in a wide range of applications.
In a patent description U.S. Pat. No. 5,956,431, Iourcha et al. disclose a texture compression scheme called S3TC (S3 Texture Compression) or DXTC (DirectX Texture Compression). An image is decomposed into a number of image blocks of 4 pixels×4 pixels. Each such image block is encoded into a bit sequence of 64 bits, thus resulting in a compression rate of 4 bpp (bits per pixel). The 64-bit sequence comprises two basic colors or color codewords (16 bits each) and a 32-bit sequence of 2-bit indices, one index for each pixel in the image block. During decoding, a color palette of four colors is generated. The first two RGB (red, green and blue) colors of the palette correspond to the two basic colors (codewords). The two additional colors, situated between the basic colors in the RGB space, are then interpolated therefrom. Each 2-bit index then identifies, for each pixel, one of the four colors of the palette to use for that pixel.
Although, the S3TC scheme works fairly well for computer terminals, it is not well adapted for mobile units and other thin clients. Such mobile units typically only have memory busses of 16 or 32 bits at best. Thus, at least two, and possibly up to four, memory accesses are required to read out the 64-bit compressed version of an image block, if S3TC is implemented in a mobile unit. In addition, during the interpolation of the two additional colors of the color palette, multiplication by ⅓ and ⅔ is performed, which is not ideal in hardware. The compression using S3TC is also relatively time consuming, at least on a mobile terminal.
The S3TC scheme handles alpha textures as a special case. The bits are then interpreted differently in order to allow for a so-called punch-through alpha. This simple version of alpha mechanism represents each pixel as either being completely opaque or transparent. The fact that S3TC cannot handle more accurate alpha is one of the major drawbacks of the system.